Move Jobs to Workers and Clear Freeways
If driving in Southern California is harrowing today, when our population is about 13 million, what will it be like in 20 years, when the number of residents rises to more than 18 million? By the year 2010 the number of motor vehicles in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, San Bernardino, Imperial and Riverside counties is expected to have grown by 42%. That statistic means that for every 1,000 cars on the road today there will be 1,420 then.
Is anyone doing anything to prevent gridlock? Yes, fortunately. Local elected officials in the six counties have agreed on a vision for the region’s transportation system--a mobility plan that can restore the level of traffic flow that we had in 1984, even though there will be many more of us using the roads. The mobility plan would work in conjunction with a growth-management plan that is comprehensive and regionwide, a very different thing from our usual pattern of ad-hoc responses to local problems. (Together, these plans also act as a cornerstone of the Air Quality Management District plan for our air basin, now in the final stage of development.)
Some answers given to our transportation problems are not the expected ones. One usual way to combat freeway overcrowding is simply to build more freeways. (A plan that was considered and rejected called for tremendous freeway construction and an extensive system of rail lines, but vacant land and money--the plan had a price tag of $110 billion--are too scarce to solve all of our traffic problems that way.) The mobility plan says that we should build more modestly and work at making a lot of trips unnecessary.
How? We drive as much as we do because our work and our homes are too far apart. Businesses locate in our crowded downtowns while most affordable housing for workers is in outlying areas. Hundreds of thousands of employees climb into their cars and flood the freeways morning and evening, many driving clear across the region. Much of this travel could be avoided if we located some of the new businesses pouring into the Southland in the outlying areas, where the people already live, and built some new housing near the places where businesses are already established. More effective community design would allow many people to walk to work or take local transit. Even if they did have to drive, it could be perhaps five miles on local streets rather than 50 miles on freeways. The eventual goal of this plan is for the six-county region to become a collection of 24 largely self-sufficient subregions, each having enough jobs to support the people who live within it. This idea, called jobs/housing balance, would drastically reduce cross-regional commutes and improve air quality.
The fresh solution to rush-hour traffic is equally unexpected: Abolish rush hours. We have rush hours because we all try to use the freeway at the same time, on the same days. Staggering our work hours and work days would instantly increase freeway capacity. If some firms started the work day at 7:30 a.m., some at 8:00 and 8:30 and others at 9:00 and 9:30, both the morning and evening peaks on the freeways would flatten out and traffic would move more freely. If some people took their “Saturday” on a weekday, demand for roadway space would drop. And trucks could make their deliveries during off-hours.
Data entry, word-processing, report-writing and similar jobs can be done at home, full or part time. With a computer and modem, many information workers can do their tasks anywhere, and can send the finished product over phone lines to computers at work. And whenever someone doesn’t have to drive to work, everybody who does have to drive benefits.
The mobility plan also calls for doubling the bus fleet, instituting 190 miles of commuter rail lines and adding to the freeways a 1,250-mile, regionwide system of van-pool and car-pool lanes; it has been shown that when such traffic-easing modes are made attractive, they are used. And the plan would upgrade the existing system, with coordinated traffic signals and more driver-information displays, so that we get the most out of what we’ve already bought and paid for.
But the plan’s basic point of view about transportation is clear--we must change old habits. To keep the streets and roadways operable, we’re going to have to rethink the way we use them, the hours and days when we use them and, in some cases, whether we need to use them at all.
Realizing the vision in the mobility and growth-management plans will require the coordinated efforts of cities and communities. It will require that we plan wisely, correct the causes of our traffic problems, use our resources well and find additional funds. The cost of the mobility plan is $56 billion, about half that of trying to build our way out. It’s a lot of money, more than twice the amount expected by 2010 from the usual funding sources, but it must be found. Doing nothing will lead us to gridlock, and that would be the most expensive course of all--leading us to an annual $26-billion cost in delays and time loss.
